I spend a lot of time surfing the internet, and looking for new blogs to read. I must say that some of my favorite blogs are written by women, and I thought I'd share a few of my "must reads". These blogs, in my opinion are some of the best in their field, and wanted to recognize some of the best bloggers in the world.

Dooce
For those of you who have never heard the term "dooced" before, you should read what it means. Utah blogger Heather Armstrong contributes in whimsical, sarcastic and sometimes vulgar way on her blog. And I love it. I do have somewhat of a risque side to me, and Heather touches on that almost every day. If you want a taste of how funny she can be, you should read her Frequently Asked Questions page.

Whoorl
Last year, this blog was basically prego mommy meets the OC. Blogger Whoorl (aka Sarah) spent a majority of last year pregnant with her adorable little baby Anders. She's got a very simple blog layout, which is saturated with some spunk and wit. When I need a break from the real world, I check out to see what kind of recent discoveries of motherhood she's going through. A fun read, especially for moms.

Building My Empire
I've been following this blog for some time now - talk about a woman who's driven to make money online. Empress, as she calls herself, has been pimping her blog for a while now, and seems to be seeing the fruits of her labor. To be honest, I've never seen anyone try so hard to make money online, as she is with affiliate marketing. Loaded with content, her blog is a fine example of how to build a blog online, with the intentions of providing helpful tips, as well as how to make money.

Lastly, I wanted to share a few blogs I've seen over the past few months that are being used to showcase work. Many people are using Wordpress to display their portfolios, which is a great way to utilize "blogging" for business. I'll take that concept a step further in an upcoming article about businesses adding blogs, but for now, here's a little eye candy created by women bloggers. Phokiss Photography, Expressions by Michelle, Beyond Ordinary are fine examples of photography sites, using creativity to mask their blog.

So if you're new to the blogging world, take a look at some of these sites - they are successful, and I believe that we can all learn from them. They are really good examples of how to display content, how to encourage interaction and how to be creative with your blog.

Over the past week, I have taken one of my sites, and performed a pretty simple experiment. Like most bloggers, my main question when starting my blog was "How can I get traffic to it."

I'm sure all bloggers ask this when they begin their blog. People want to be heard, or in this case read. So we strive to get people to our blog.

Obviously there's the well-known saying "content is king". I agree, but wanted to test the waters on another theory I had brewing.

I've experience some really good success getting search engine traffic from Google, mainly with my sites that are using Wordpress. I will admit my themes have some degree of coding that is geared to be friendly to search engines, but this theory that kept begging me to explore finally was confirmed this past week.

Here's what I did.

I took a handful of 3 or 4 word searches that I wanted to target. I created a post, with those 3 or 4 words as the first ones in the blog title. Then I wrote a fairly short (meaning 3 to 4 paragraph) post, making sure I repeated those words in order at least once in a paragraph.

The results.

Every search I went after I landed on the first page of Google within a few days. I can't guarantee results, but I can share the success I had with my site. Best of luck, and leave comments with your experiments!